


The Tempter Of The Worm

by stinkyfic



Category: The Terror (TV 2018), The Terror - Dan Simmons
Genre: Blood Loss, Blood and Gore, Character Study, Closeted Character, Explicit Language, Illustrations, Injury, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Mild Suicide Ideation, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Sexism, Stanley POV, Unrequited Lust, accidental injury, artistic liberty with how much blood one can lose maybe??, colourful language and metaphors concerning wounds and sex, disinterested goodsir, mentions of stanley's wife so either he's unfaithful or divorced (up to you), period-typical unsanitary doctorial practices, they make out but at what cost????, those feelings of sex and surgery babes just like what jenny holzer warned us about!, very graphic descriptions of gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-17 21:54:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29723778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stinkyfic/pseuds/stinkyfic
Summary: It constantly felt like Goodsir could see that he was specifically marked as aberrant, that he wore it as plain as the freckles on his face. That Goodsir could tell that he was different in such a way that disrupted the natural order of things. That he, in his unnatural desires, had tread carefully into the realm of the monstrous.Stanley injures his hand in a childish fit of rage. Despite his wishes, Goodsir patches him up. Unbeknownst to Goodsir, Stanley has been struggling with unnatural thoughts and desires for nearly his whole adult life, and now he is delirious with blood loss and his handsome assistant surgeon is sat very close to him. But, is Goodsir encouraging him?A Stanley character study completed to fillTheTerrorBingoprompt: "Injury Recovery".
Relationships: Harry D. S. Goodsir/Stephen S. Stanley
Comments: 10
Kudos: 20
Collections: The Terror Bingo





	The Tempter Of The Worm

**Author's Note:**

> Filling The Terror Bingo prompt: Injury Recovery, although a full recovery isn't shown but like....this is practically the same thing right?  
> Anyway this is DARK, I'm really going in on Stanley's internalised homophobia and fear of emasculation. There is graphic talk of injury, of (female) genitalia, of sexualised gore and overall just period-typical attitudes towards homosexuality and women.The gore is DETAILED so please be prepared for that!  
> Anyway! Please enjoy!  
> ALSO: I illustrated this fic! The image is embedded into the text! All copyrights to the image belong to me!

He would have outbursts like this every few months.

Dr Stephen Stanley was always very careful to control such petulant emotions back home. Such displays of frustrated anger would never give him the respect he garnered. He remembered once when he had caught the ghostly visage of his daughter’s face through the dark banister of the stairwell, freezing him in his act of pushing documents and inkwells off of his desk, in throttling his anger out on a screwed-up parchment, in tearing his nails over his scalp.

The image of her watching him had burned a shame so deep down into his gut that he had seen her face like that, eyes wide with confusion and lips tight with fear, behind his eyelids for months afterwards. _‘I’m sorry, darling.’_ He had said, but she had turned from him and ran back to her room, disappearing into the dark. From that moment on, he had been sure to keep a tight lock on his emotions- but even the strongest of locks broke down eventually, rusted in the cold.

These outbursts seemed to be happening more and more frequently as the days ticked away on the ice.

He was in his cabin, in the solace of the four walls that closed in on his towering frame. It was gone 10pm, his pocket watch laid open on the table in front of him and he watched it with a scathing obsessiveness as he leaned over it. He had changed into his nightshirt, no longer on call in the medical bay, and the heels of each hand were pushed into the creaking wood of his small work desk, the sleeves gathering around his wrists.

If he were one of his patients, he may have advised deep breathing and perhaps a drop of laudanum to soothe the bubbling anger that was fast rising, burning up his throat. However, he found himself quite often not wanting to stop the feeling, allowing it with almost open arms to envelope him entirely.

A drop of sweat fell from his forehead and spotted next to his watch, mocking him with its tear-like appearance.

Usually, these outbursts were an amalgamation of the various stressors to be expected of being the chief surgeon on a doomed expedition, dealing every day with men who were in pain, or who were dying, or who had died. Stephen was well adjusted in these issues. He had been a war surgeon before the Franklin Expedition, he had seen men die on the daily- but never like this, never as slow as this.

Still, what would his qualifications stand for if they didn’t allow him to drive a wedge between these events and his personal opinions of them? And so that’s what he did and had been doing since the war.

It was of no consequence to him. Men died. People died. The most he could do was try and make it as comfortable as possible for them when they did.

However, his anger on this night was caused by his assistant surgeon. There was something in him that knew that Harry Goodsir didn’t respect him. He had known what it was like back home to look a man in the eyes and know that there was no reverence behind them. His whole career as a surgeon was consistently coupled with disdainful looks and passing glances from physicians, of whom esteemed themselves of a higher standard than the lowly surgeon, of the surgeon and his audacity to cut into bodies, to plunder a knife into God’s work.

Goodsir was no physician, and yet that guarded shock of steel ran through his gaze when he turned it upon Stephen. Stephen had used his connections to pay for Goodsir’s medical tools, for most of his medicine chest, he had funded his naturalist studies, and put in a good word for him with the Captain, but it was as if Goodsir had no gratitude whatsoever. Did Stephen expect gratitude? Was that what this was about?

No. Not really. Stephen had done those things more to fulfil his own duties as head surgeon rather than for any altruistic goodness, more of a selfish act than a selfless one. And yet Goodsir enraged him.

More than enraged him, really, he _plagued_ him.

Stephen was faintly aware of a creaking noise in the far-off distance, and it took him a while to realise it was the sound of his own jaw as he gritted his teeth down tightly.

_The dog who is so angry he cannot move. He cannot eat. He can just barely growl._

The table had begun to shake under his weight, his fists clamped so tightly closed he could feel his pulse in every tiny bone there. The vision of his pocket watch laid in front of him blurred out of object significance, providing itself as only a point to fix his eyes on. His eyes were drying out with the sheer heat of his face.

_Bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches the state of rigor mortis._

The catalyst of Stephen’s anger was something that he tried to keep buried within him. He knew this. He knew of it and the way it would worm throughout him like a black maggot, tarring itself to his ribcage and between his organs. It was these feelings that fed the fire to his anger, these feelings of which he had convinced himself should be forgotten when he was a young man. And for a while he _had_ forgotten about them.

Yes, they would raise their ugly head whenever one of Stephen’s professors had glanced at him a certain way or whenever he had passed by a certain man’s dormitory in his all-boys school. Or when he had first seen the cadaver of another man, or had touched the sweat festered, blistering hot and very much alive flesh of a male patient. But he pushed it down. Swallowed them like a tonic.

He knew what they called men like him. He had heard the colourful language and seen the humiliating ramifications in the army, in the navy. From his father. From his peers. But he had done so well. He had abolished these sordid temptations. He had married, he had fulfilled his wife’s biological duty- _his_ duty- and had children with her. He had a daughter of whom he loved. He had crushed these temptations down into the deepest pits of his bowel, so finely ground that not even a trained scalpel could extract them.

He had done everything so convincingly that even he himself had begun to forget such thoughts had ever polluted him.

That was until Harry Goodsir. The Harry Goodsir who didn’t respect him, the man who disregarded all his surgeon training to cover the face of a boy before he cut into him, the man who seemed to always have an air of kindness about him, and who weaponized that kindness against people like Stephen. The man who would sooner disregard his duties to go work on a dictionary, who would backchat Stephen in front of patients. And yet Goodsir’s aloofness towards him only encouraged that worming maggot, and it sickened him.

He had worked so hard to crush that worm for over forty years, and now it was thriving healthy in his gut, feeding on the rot that Harry Goodsir provided.

His breath was whistling hot through his nose, knuckles white and pushing further into the wood of the table. His entire body was tense, and his face was hot. He could feel a pulsing in his forehead, his blood thudding in his temples and into his ears. The deck beneath his feet was cold and it gripped him by his bare ankles, rooting him to the spot.

There was a small glass bottle on the table, it was empty, but it had been holding vinegar. He had been meaning to refill it and place it back within his medical chest, but it stood barren and within reaching distance. Stephen’s gaze flickered very quickly from his timepiece to this bottle. He thought of the inkwells he had been pushing from his desk when his daughter had spied him.

Stephen prided himself on his professional presence in the sick bay, and this was constantly undermined by Goodsir’s simpering gratifications towards the men. It annoyed him at the best of times, the way he would soften Stephen’s proficiency with his small remarks and soothing comforts, but on a bad day- like today- it downright drove him to distraction.

Stephen had spent the entire shift sitting in an all-consuming wrath, his jaw hinged shut, unable to speak for the possibility that Goodsir would converse with him. The way the man held a conversation with Stephen, the way he seemed to merely tolerate him with his discussion, it drove Stephen into a red mist of which he had never felt the likes of before. Why did it seem to him that Goodsir _knew?_ That he could somehow peer through Stephen and into the black bile in his gut? That he was somehow aware of this maggot that ate through him?

It constantly felt like Goodsir could see that he was specifically marked as aberrant, that he wore it as plain as the freckles on his face. That Goodsir could tell that he was different in such a way that disrupted the natural order of things. That he, in his unnatural desires, had tread carefully into the realm of the monstrous.

And that he saw all of this, with his knowing glances and soft smiles, and yet unknowingly encouraged such feelings within Stephen with every turn of his head and gaze with those dark lashes.

He didn’t know when he had reached for the bottle, but now it was within his grip, both his hands wrapping tightly around the small cold frame of it, choking it as if it were a living thing. His hands were shaking with the exertion of the force he was applying, his chest tightened, shoulders knotting up. Sweat itched his brow, his breath coming out hot.

He had moved back from the table a few paces now, as if wrestling with the force of his own being, staring down at his hands as he tried to figure out a way to expel his frustration.

_This was childish._

He slammed the bottle back on the table. He had meant to position it back in its place, but hadn’t been gentle enough, hadn’t moved away quick enough. His bodily strength had outmatched his doctoral patience. He felt a sickening swoop in his stomach as the glass gave way under his hand.

Something warm hit his face, darting up his chin and over his mouth. Copper.

He looked down. His hand was shaking where it gripped tightly onto the bottle. The bottle had cleaved itself in half, slipping an ugly shard of brown glass into the soft flesh of his hand.

Immediately, Stephen felt a cold sweat spring from his brow, his gums numb as he stared down at himself, his head feeling at least a mile away from his shoulders.

As if burned, he unhanded the bottle. There was a grating feeling of glass on the hard cartilage of bone as hot blood lubricated the slide of glass to leave his hand. A fountain of blood seemed to erupt, covering his shaking hand and dripping onto the table.

He didn’t make a noise. Instead, his mouth had clamped shut and his breath came out fast and hard through his nose.

_This wasn’t ideal._

At first, Stephen brought his other hand up to the wound, pressing his fingers into the surrounding flesh as if he could close it through the force of willpower alone. His sleeve was already saturated with blood, hanging heavy from his wrist and blooming up his arm.

He could see that the cut had hit him in the middle of the meaty flesh at the heel of his hand and had sliced up into his wrist. He had hit a main artery. The blood was hot and viscous as it squirted from the wound.

He made a noise then. A sick sort of cry. Not loud but steeped in dread.

He stumbled back, pressing his hand over the wound. The pain was dull and almost non-existent. He clamped down hard with the sleeve of his night shirt over his fist, squeezing his wrist. He was aware of a noise like a steam train, and he realised it was his own hyperventilation.

_This really wasn’t good._

He could think of nothing else to do. All his anger was dissolved out of him, it was barely even comprehensible to him now that he could feel anything other than panic at this moment in time. He forced himself to still, to gather his professionalism. He clutched his hand to his chest, feeling the warmth of his own blood seep into the wool of his nightshirt, pinning it to him.

Without much thought, he pushed his weight against the handle of his berth door and staggered out into the halls. He had to suture the wound, or he would be dead. That was the simplicity of it. It was the simplicity that he would have provided to his patients, and now he turned it upon himself.

In his haste to get out of his uniform, Stephen had neglected to button his nightshirt all the way up, and now he felt the cold air hit the sweat and blood on his neck and chest with an unwelcome chill. The arctic air hit his legs and rose under the shirt, taking his breath away from him in a cruel punch.

He forced himself to power forwards, his face stricken and pale, sweat rolling off him as easily as the blood that now dripped down his front and onto the floor beneath him.

The halls were cold and dark, there were a few seaman and marines hanging around the warm lanterns of the mess.

He was aware of voices around him, no doubt of concern. He must have been quite the spectacle. His white night clothes drenched in blood, storming ahead with a face like thunder, his eyes distant and unfocused, breathing in forced steady draws. He ignored them. Had no choice but to. He was incapable of focusing on anything else but walking.

He turned a corner a little too hard, headfirst, crashing unsteadily into a wall. He continued to move despite this, his bare feet slipping on the blood where it pooled. He could feel claret drying on his face, making his skin tight.

It was a miracle he had made it down the ladder into the orlop. By the time he entered the sick bay his vision had a steady black haze around the edges. His breathing was still strong, but his diaphragm felt gelatinous under his lungs. His hand was clutched to his chest, his nightshirt spilled with blood down the entire front, his exposed chest and neck shiny with it. He could feel his shoulders shaking, rattling down the sides of his ribs with adrenaline.

Mr Goodsir had been tending to a young seaman, he was sat pale and sickly upon the operating table as Goodsir looked him over patiently and quietly. It was the boy who spotted Stephen at first, and the pure look of terror on the lad’s face had encouraged Goodsir to spin around as if he were being attacked.

“ _Good lord_!” he all but shrieked.

Stephen felt the need to glare at him, but he didn’t have the energy. He figured his face must have looked a picture of discontent anyway, as the boy on the operating table now began to visibly shake in fear.

He moved without thinking, gravitating towards his medical chest, towards where he would find dressings and needles.

“Doctor, what happened?!” Goodsir was behind him, following him, dogging his heels. Stephen remained silent, breathing hard. He could feel his hand slipping wet and hot over his wrist, a dull pulse under his palm.

He reached his medical chest and unwillingly leaned his entire weight against the table, knocking a few bottles. He made the unpleasant discovery that if he removed his hand to look through the chest then the compress he had created would fail, leaving blood to spurt from his artery in full force. There was a rising sense of frustrated panic in his chest, along with a dull thudding of blood behind his eyes. He felt as if his teeth were chattering.

“Dr Stanley, you need to sit down.” Goodsir’s voice sounded strained and thin, at his elbow now.

Stephen felt a warm tug at the material of his sleeve and realised that Goodsir had a hold of him, or at least his nightshirt, and was looking up into his face with a look of horrified panic. Those wide cow eyes of his were impossibly big in his face, eyebrows furrowed so tightly that they strained his forehead.

Stephen tried his best to jerk away, but he stumbled on his footing, resulting in Goodsir grabbing him with more force, this time holding onto his upper arm. A jolt of pain coursed over him in a shock, but then it was gone again and his body was numb once more.

“Dr Stanley, you need to be seen to.”

“S’fine…” was all he could manage, but then his head was shot with a wave of white light, his vision clouding over momentarily, and he swooned, his upper body falling heavily into Goodsir’s from where he stood unsteadily.

Goodsir made a valiant noise, his cheek colliding with the taller man’s shoulder as he tried to steady him. Stephen's hand still gripped tightly to his chest, but his legs seemed to want to give out from under him. He felt as if his feet were rising off the ground and plummeting all at once, slipping on the wooden floor in his own claret, falling further into the smaller frame of his assistant surgeon. He could feel his pulse in his lips, his vision fully black for a horrifying second. A warm hand was on the small of his back, and then another on his upper arm, and before he knew it, he had collapsed into a sitting position onto the same operating table that previously held the seaman. There was no sight of him now.

“Let me see the wound, sir.”

Stephen felt a frisson of ugly pride then, a sort of stubbornness. He clenched his fist tighter over his wrist, barely able to focus on the man in front of him. This man who he had just been lamenting over, who had made every day on this expedition a living hell for Stephen, who had awakened the worm within him again after decades. This man may as well have caused this.

His vision was spinning, but he found that the longer he was sat still, the more he seemed to settle. Eventually the room stopped its blurred journey, and he was instead left with that black vignette again that pulsed steadily with the same rhythm he felt in his jaw, behind his eyes, in his temples. A weak pulse, but existent.

“Dr Stanley, let me tend to the wound.” Goodsir’s voice was hard. As hard as Stephen had ever heard it. But Stephen seemed unable to let go of his hand, still drawing it into his chest with a petulance.

He would rather die, bleed out, than appear vulnerable to this man. The tempter of the worm.

Stephen’s fingers were stiff where they wrapped firmly around his wrist, cold and pale, half covered with a bloody sleeve. He felt his gaze travel to Goodsir, his eyes fighting to focus. His breath was coming out hard but slow, face chilled with a sheen of sweat and dried blood. He was sure his body was shaking, but he was unable to tell for sure.

Mr Goodsir stood before him, his sleeves rolled up in preparation of the sheer amount of blood Stephen had padded into the room. His forearms were pale but strong and covered in thick dark hair that crawled over the backs of his wrists and onto his hands. The man was narrow all over, and yet there was a strength to him. His shoulders were compact, and they sat under his waistcoat and shirt sleeves, chest slim and waist slight, encased in black wool and brass buttons. It was dreamlike, to have him stood so close to Stephen in that moment, looking like he did.

“Sir.” His face was tight with irritation, his eyes soulful and worried. His cheek was smudged with blood where Stephen had leaned into him, flattening one side of his thick side whiskers. His hair was ever-growing as they were trapped on the ice, and it hung in loose curls over his forehead, sitting heavy on the back of his neck.

Stephen swallowed weakly as he sat, blood loss effectively quashed for now by the tight draw of his fist to his pulse point, observing the man before him. This wasn’t good. He wasn’t in a right frame of mind. The worm crawled in his bowels, hungry.

Goodsir’s hand was hot and gentle, like the body of a dove, as he gripped Stephen’s non-injured wrist. Stephen continued to stare into Goodsir’s face, his mouth working in a snarl as the assistant pressed his fingers to the inside of his wrist and worked to pull his hands away from his chest.

“You’re being ridiculous.” Goodsir’s voice was a hard mutter, as if spoken to himself more than anyone else. The shock of the insult loosened Stephen’s frame, his brows raising in shock at the fact that his assistant surgeon had just called him ridiculous. To his face.

Goodsir pulled Stephen’s hands away from his chest. They unstuck themselves from the blood that sat congealed there, heaving at his skin. The chill in the air found his slicked chest and Stephen felt himself cooling, letting himself focus on the sensation rather than the surgeon’s gentle hands on his own.

He wasn’t yet aware of any pain stemming from his cut. He theorised this was the adrenaline. The same adrenaline that caused his legs to shake, exposed and cold, as he anchored them onto the deck from where he sat on the edge of the operating table.

The blood had pooled in his lap, warming him and chilling him all at once. The material of his nightshirt itched his skin where it stuck to him, plastered across his thighs.

Sweat poured down Stephen's back, his eyes unable to tear away from the mess of flesh and blood that had become of his hands where they gripped to one another in a vice hold. He couldn’t tell where one hand ended and the other began. He was vaguely aware of thinking how pale his skin had become, how his knuckles seemed almost blue against the black red of his own blood.

Goodsir pried his fingers firmly under the fist of Stephen’s uninjured hand, working with more resistance than was expected to pull the doctor away from himself. Stephen could only stare as his body seemed to work against him, gripping tighter and firmer, shaking with the exertion. Goodsir was pale as he tried to pull him apart, trying to open him up. He strained, teeth gnashing.

“There’s…” Stephen started, his voice was weak and cracked, unable to take his gaze away from Goodsir’s face, watching his brow bead with sweat as if in a dream. He didn’t really comprehend what he wanted to say. He had started on a word that didn’t even connect to any sentence he may have had in his clouded mind. Goodsir’s head snapped up to meet him, his brow furrowed. “the pressure…” was all he decided on. His eyelids were heavy and a wave of tiredness washed over him, leaving as soon as it had surfaced.

Goodsir looked at him incredulously, as if he had expected more from the sentence. He looked down to the wound again, his own hands now saturated with the doctor’s blood.

“Right,” was all he said, as quiet as a wisp. Then he let go of his prying hold, turning away from where Stephen was sitting in a quick movement.

Stephen attempted to follow him with his gaze, but it was as if he were short sighted, only able to see what was close in front of him with any form of clarity. He looked down helplessly at his hands, where they sat knotted together in his lap now. He took deep breaths: in through the nose, out through the mouth. His vice grip had slowed the blood flow considerably, it now only oozed lazily between his knuckles, quickening slightly as it was drawn away from the safety of his chest.

He would never admit it, but he was afraid to let go.

As his breathing steadied, so did his vision. There was an empty feeling in his chest, all his limbs felt hollow and weakened. The knuckles in his gripping hand screamed at him like hot wires pushing through his skin, begging him to let go. The bones in his hand seemed to complain under the pressure alone. His skin had dyed red, not an inch of natural complexion escaped from the mercilessness of his own blood- his sleeves and front, his lap, even his legs were becoming sticky now with the congealed substance. And he couldn’t stop himself from shaking, even though he wanted nothing more in the world.

He was a man who had worked through a war, had studied cadavers for years, endured humiliation from his superiors and disdain from his family. He had seen his wife give birth, had held his daughter in his arms as she was still bloody. And yet now he sat as quiet as a lamb, pale and sickly, unable to even tend to his own wounds.

He refused to let Goodsir see him like this, and yet here he was, pushed against his will into making a monstrous spectacle of himself. God what a misery. And what if Goodsir thought that he had done this as an escape? That he had sliced his wrist like this as a last resort, that he somehow had given up, that he had let his emotions climb on top of him and dominate him, driving into him, pushing him to the edge. The humiliation piled up on top of him at the thought.

He wouldn’t admit to himself that he had considered it, had entertained these ideas multiple times. He would never admit that the bleak expanse of the ice surrounding him every morning, the constant deaths of the men around him of whom he was unable to help, even the sickening feeling of that black maggot awakening in his gut- had pushed him to consider an escape of the most unchristian nature.

This was driven down deep within him, deeper than the worm. Driven down so far that he had digested it, passed it, absorbed it into his very being to never be found again. But he was looking down at his wrist, his wrist clenched tightly by his own pale fist, and there was some remnant, some undigested, sour and rotten remains of those thoughts that clawed up from his stomach lining, burning him with a bile up his throat.

Goodsir was back in front of him before he could register. The man’s lithe body was so close, stood between the spread of Stephen’s legs. In his ridiculousness he managed to remember how little he was wearing.

He was not afraid of nudity, nor of his own body- or even being vulnerable for that matter. He didn’t feel one way or the other about his own body, nor the bodies of others. It was a nonchalance that came with the job. He had barely reacted to his wife on their wedding night before realising that she was expecting more from him. His whole life regarding nudity felt like a performance of sorts. That black worm had reared its head most strongly on that night, in the end all he managed to feel convincingly was a sense of pity when he looked upon her small, naked frame beneath him.

So why now did he feel exposed when Goodsir was standing so near to him?

Perhaps it was the blood loss. Making him weak. Scrambling his brain. Feeding the worm.

“The haemorrhaging looks worse than it is.” Goodsir’s voice sounded far away. He was attempting to comfort him, in the same way that he did with his other patients. Stephen was aware of this fact; he knew that the sheer amount of blood only looked bad because of the way it was seeping into his clothes. If he had lost as much blood as it looked like he had, then he would cease to be sitting up. He found Goodsir’s attempt at comfort more irritatingly illogical than soothing. More like he was bringing his own surgical knowledge into question.

There was a hard feeling at the bottom of Stephen’s forearm, just above the crook of his elbow, and Stephen was vaguely aware of a tourniquet belt being looped around him. Goodsir was leant into his personal space, his body barely making contact with Stephen’s save for the hard lean of his wrist on his upper arm. Stephen grunted as Goodsir pulled away from him, arching his back, his strong shoulders working to tighten the belt, sending a shock of pins and needles up Stephen’s arm and into his shoulder.

There was a terrible feeling of immediate numbness in his fingertips then, and Stephen was briefly aware of what it might feel like if had to lose his hand. He tried to imagine a life where he couldn’t use his hands, his surgeon’s hands. The tools he had spent his entire life developing. The thought chilled him to the core.

“You’re going to need to describe the wound to me, if you won’t let me see it, Sir.” Goodsir was back in front of him again, still so close. There was a pallor to his face. As he spoke he flicked his head to the side to rid himself of a forelock, his breathing seemed laboured. The man appeared just as distressed as Stephen, but it was muffled with a definite coverage of professionalism.

Stephen looked at him agape, feeling his shoulder complaining at him as the blood pooled there. He was aware now that his entire arm had gone numb, his fingers tingled with cold.

Then there was a new feeling. It was the pain. The pain that he had managed to avoid up until now. It was sharp, incredibly so, like a bee sting. It ran up his forearm in a dull thudding ache. The only thing he could compare it to was when he had slipped with a scalpel many times in his youth. The swift drag of the blade through his skin was not unlike a papercut, but heavier somehow, more of a pulling than a slicing. It was a white-hot pain, sliding over his wrist like a razor over a tooth. Metallic and grating, hitting the roots of his gums.

He grimaced against it, his body tightening. The fist on his wrist now caused him more discomfort than protection.

“It’s, uh…” his teeth were set on edge, jaw clenched so tight it was hard to speak, “an incision. Not deep,” he grasped for his training. “Nicked an artery,” and then: “accident.” As if in some feeble attempt to protect his dignity.

Goodsir was nodding with every word he said, his eyes focused and clear, reflecting the warm light in the sick bay. His mouth was pursed into a thin line as his mind raced, his pupils covering every inch of Stephen’s face quickly as he spoke. He wasn’t settled on his feet, as if ready to dart to any corner of the medical bay at any given notice.

“Right, okay,” he looked down then to Stephen’s hand. The blood had stopped seeping from between his fingers now, the tourniquet doing its job effectively. “I will have to see the extent of the wound sir. If the artery is too heavily injured, then I will have to tie it off. You do realise what that entails?”

Yes. An amputation.

Stephen swallowed thickly, his head light and his vision sweeping into black for a moment. White spots danced in the blackness, and there was an awful moment where his throat constricted, stomach tightening, and he thought he might be sick. Pathetic. He had seen worse in the war. But it was oh so different when it was yourself, wasn’t it?

“If not, I can suture the artery with silk. It’s a tricky job. But I’m willing to try.” Goodsir’s voice was far away. Stephen's vision was still too heavily unfocused and clouded to see him, but he could sense him moving around the room. There was a scraping of a stool and the rustling of a medical box.

“Do what you must.” _Just do it quickly, for god’s sake!_ He didn’t want to pass out here, not now, not in front of Goodsir.

Then Goodsir entered his field of vision again, in steadily improving lucidity. He had pulled a high stool up to the edge of the operating table, and he hoisted himself up on it until he was settled within Stephen’s gait. His knees brushed against the inside of his bare thighs and Stephen felt another bolt of pain stream up his arm, as if the touch were directly wired to his wounds. Goodsir’s black clad thighs became leech-like in their contact, making Stephen bloodless, sick to his stomach. But he didn’t move away.

In a matter of seconds, Stephen’s hand had been pried away from his wound. Goodsir considered the wound through the obstruction of the blood which now sat jellified in the laceration, pulsating like some beast. Stephen seemed unable to look away.

The cut looked worse than it was, he had been a surgeon for long enough to realise when haemorrhaging cloaked a wound in more urgency than it actually garnered. Stephen’s mind buzzed to white as he looked down at himself. His other hand had fallen into his lap, heavy and lifeless, hollow with the sudden release of tension in his joints.

Goodsir held Stephen's injured hand firmly with both hands, thumbs on either side of the gash. He applied a small amount of pressure and the wound opened like a cunt, drooling blood. A bolt of pain shot through Stephen as he was pried open, causing his back to stiffen. He clamped his teeth tighter closed, his vision coming over fuzzy for another brief second.

Stephen realised he was staring up at the ceiling of the sick bay and had probably been doing so for a while. He was aware of a rushing sound of blood in his ears. He had willed his body into a stiff line, his back strained and his legs pushing down into the operating table, as if he hoped to jump away from Goodsir at any given second.

He could feel the heat radiating off of his assistant surgeon as he sat between him, his fingers were sullied with Stephen’s own blood. Tainted. Making them slightly sticky where they pushed into his cold hand. He didn’t know how much time had passed, or if in fact any time had passed at all. All he was aware of was the pain that flowed in waves down his arm and into his wrist, thumping, flowing like a river of ground up glass in his veins.

He was so close to him. Close enough for Stephen to smell him. He smelled of soap and sweat and the unmistakable stench of blood. He had often watched Goodsir from afar, watching his body move about the sick bay, sickening himself with his own observations. The black maggot writhed in his gut gleefully, satiated by the closeness of the other man, but hungry for more. Always hungry for more. He was losing control of himself, he could feel his grip on reality slipping away as the pain seeped into his body like icy water.

Then there was a sharpness. It cut through the dull thud of the rest of the grief. It was concentrated into his inner wrist but he was unused to the exact sensation. It was at once alien and yet familiar.

Stephen’s head was heavy as he snapped his gaze down, his body wanting to rise from his seat with the sudden tremor that ran through his hand. His face was hot and cold at the same time, breathing hard and struggling to be controlled. He felt as if his jaw would crack with the pressure he had clenched it closed with.

Goodsir was bespectacled, and he had a strong grip on Stephen's outer wrist, laying his injured hand firmly in his lap where he sat. Something in the depths of Stephen’s mind suddenly felt very conscious of the back of his hand where it rested on one of his hot woollen clad thighs, and he refrained from a childish instinct to pull away as the black maggot squirmed within him.

His mind was dreamlike. He couldn’t help but feel as if he had been in this position before, at the mercy of this man who didn’t respect him. Perhaps in a dream he had long since suppressed. Flashes of imagery: of himself on his back, of Mr Goodsir on his back, of bodily fluids mixed together- spilling like a ruptured amniotic sack. Their bodies morphed together until they became one horrifying mass in their union. Copulated into a monstrousness that drenched Stephen in sweat and semen. He was in that headspace now.

Goodsir was leant over his injury. He had procured a suturing needle and silk thread; Stephen could tell it was silk since he had a spool of the same stuff in his own medical box. Silk was favoured for internal stitches- although Stephen had only heard of an artery being stitched up on a few rare occasions, and only by a standard of surgeon that was well above Goodsir’s training.

Still, here he was, carefully passing the needle into the cord of white tendon that was his main artery, pushing extremely carefully through the delicate tissue there. Stephen attempted to detach himself from his own body, viewing his own wound as if it were on a patient and not himself, but this was increasingly difficult as he was more and more aware of the sharp, stinging pain running up his arm.

He couldn’t stop himself from watching his assistant’s hands, dirtied with him, carefully spreading his wound like the bud of a flower. Like a split fig. pulling him apart as if for penetration, as if he had become feminine, yonic, with his injury; in his mental monstrousness; his inner turmoil. That black maggot. His stigmata made him a martyr to his desires, becoming the catamite that he had so feared himself being perceived as. An orifice through which to be manipulated. God, but his hands were so warm and Stephen was spread open to them.

“You’re a foolish man.” Goodsir was concentrated so hard that Stephen barely saw his mouth move as he said the words. Stephen gripped the edge of the operating table with his free hand, white knuckled from the pain, once again taken aback by his assistant’s ease in insulting him. Head spinning. “If I can pull this off, I should hope to never have to take my exams back in England.” He was talking as if it were a stream of consciousness, as if talking helped stay his focus, “I shall expect to be paraded around on the shoulders of only the best surgeons. Royal College be damned.”

Stephen’s heart picked up weakly in his chest, skipping a beat as if he were fevered. He was sick. He had never heard Goodsir talk so earnestly before. It was as if he were eavesdropping on the man as he dictated a personal family letter. His head was clouding, he no longer knew if he was actually sat before the man, or perhaps maybe he had tread into his dream realm, pushed into his unconscious. It was the only explanation for why Goodsir was talking so openly with him around. Maybe he _was_ eavesdropping.

Goodsir pushed the needle through for a few loops, and then he was done. Fast and efficient. It was as if he was taken over by the spirit of a far better and more experienced surgeon than the man Stephen had perceived in his own sick bay.

Goodsir leaned over, acquiring some small scissors and cutting the silk thread with a careful accuracy, close to the artery. The cold metal was a shock on the inside of the wound, and it caused a jolt to pass through Stephen’s body, a flinch that made him want to draw his knees tightly closed and into himself. Instead this resulted in him bumping Goodsir’s legs, and the drag of hot wool against the inside of his bare thighs made him want to disappear altogether. Sink into himself. Just him and the worm.

“Well, that’s the worst of it.” Goodsir was looking up into Stephen’s face now. His eyes were dark, almost black in the light. There was a ghost of a pleasant smile on his lips, but Stephen read it easily to be one of performance only. His eyes were hard and held an irritation behind them. “Now I will close the rest of the wound.” He shifted on his stool, retrieving a different needle and thread from where he had placed some various tools next to Stephen on the operating table. Stephen let his gaze follow his blood-soaked hands, spotting the bone saw that had been placed within Goodsir’s reach. A strange feeling washed over him, and he realised it was relief.

His arm felt as if it were no longer connected to his body, linked only through the sinew of pain that continued to buzz through him, shivering across his ribcage. Stephen’s frame was hunched slightly, his shoulders sticking to the thin wool of his nightshirt. He was aware that his vision was now beginning to settle, but he tasted copper in the back of his mouth and his head still felt detached from his body. He was inside a dream, observing everything with a clouded film, like a membrane over his consciousness. Like a cataract over an eyeball.

Goodsir settled Stephen’s cold, heavy hand further into his lap and something turned over in Stephen’s gut with a shocking wave of warmth. He looked helplessly into Goodsir’s face as if he were dying and Goodsir was a fountain of youth.

Perhaps this _was_ one of his dreams. One of those ones where his punishment seemed so closely entwined with sexual gratification. Those dreams were never pleasant, the dreams of the maggot. They left him sore and breathless, shaking in his berth. Sometimes he was back home, sometimes on the ship, sometimes he was unable to see what was happening to him- what was being inflicted onto him. Other times he could see in crystal clear clarity from outside of his body. He was both the perpetrator and the victim, blending together in that seamless way that always made sense in dreams. But it was always Mr Goodsir. Always.

Before he was aware, that stinging pain was back, and Goodsir was closing his wound on his wrist. He worked quickly and without any fuss. He had to. It was his training. His fingers were so warm. He was holding Stephen’s hand to his lap. Even through his numbness Stanley could feel the heat of his body under him.

Maybe he was making a noise now? Perhaps that’s what that low grunt was? The pain was manageable, but he was fully unconscious of it. His head was swimming, full of cotton wool. Maybe he was dreaming after all, because Mr Goodsir looked at him as the low noise had escaped his throat, and he looked almost pitiful. It’s like he knew. He knew Stephen was wrong inside. He knew his thoughts were black. But there was a similar darkness in the younger man’s eyes. Or maybe that was hatred. Whatever it was only made Stephen’s skin crawl in that way that he now realised he was learning to love.

But god, he was in pain. And Jesus, his legs were weak. And he was exposed in the small amount of clothing he wore, but he wasn’t cold. He was putrid in his own blood, his body coated in sweat.

“By some miracle…” Goodsir spoke. His voice cut through the mist that was forming around Stephen like a blindness. A blindness that focused only on anything that wasn’t Harry Goodsir. His voice was so soft. But there was that streak of wire to it. It sent Stephen mad, like a dog on a scent. “…there is no damage to your nerves.” He was pressing then, pushing his fingers into the palm of Stephen’s hand, above the incision. And god it felt awful, but it felt amazing at the same time. The pain rocketed through him like an orgasm. He reacted as such, folding forwards, closer to Goodsir. Teeth grinding, eyelids fluttering. “Your fingers are responding fine to reflexes.” Was he aware what he was doing to him? His dark gaze pierced him like a musket ball.

When had he finished stitching him up? It must have been recent. But now his wound was closed. He was unsexed once more in the closing of his orifice, but the reminder of the ritual was present, bored into his flesh like the bruise of a penny falling on a whore’s stomach as her client left her.

“You were lucky to have kept your hand.” Goodsir’s voice was low now, soft. Stephen realised that he hadn’t leaned away from him after he had folded over. His face was dangerously close to the other man’s, and yet Goodsir was looking him directly in the eyes, unmoving. “The wound will need rinsing, and you will have to avoid using your hand until the stitches take.”

Stephen was unable to focus on him, and yet he demanded his focus. His eyes were fuzzy, but he could pick out Goodsir’s features in shocking clarity. This must have been a dream. He must have been dreaming. The black maggot had crawled into his thoughts, polluted his brain. Was he now a victim of waking nightmares? Because that’s what this was. A nightmare. Not because of what he was feeling, but because of how much Stephen abhorred it. He hated that he looked into this man’s eyes and wanted to fall deep into them. He hated that he could feel this man’s breath on his clammy skin, that he could still feel this man’s gentle fingers on his injured palm.

But god, he was beautiful. He was beautiful and Stephen was exhausted by it. Exhausted by the effort it took him to deny it.

“It will need blistering over the course of the next few days.” Goodsir still wasn’t moving, sat rooted confidently to his stool, but something passed over his face then, sweeping over his features in a mottled concentration. Stanley realised he was staring directly into Goodsir’s eyes and had been doing so for a while.

The blood was fast drying on Stephen’s skin, resulting in it feeling as if it was pulled tight over his bones. His breathing was deep but disordered, the sweat making his shirt stick to his back. His fair hair was unkempt, falling over his forehead. His eyes were blown wide and dark in the light. Was it the light? Or was it, in fact, from being so close to this man? To the tempter of the worm.

Then a pain shot up his arm, hurtling through Stephen’s body in the same way it had done before. Goodsir was pushing his fingers lightly into the tender skin above the stitches again, never taking his eyes off of Stephen’s face, as if experimentally. Stephen couldn’t help his reaction, he gasped loudly. Where a normal man would have squirmed away from the pain, would have flinched into himself, Stephen instead leaned into it. It was delicious in the sense that he finally felt like he was getting what he deserved. Here he was, face to face with his unholiness, and he received instant repercussion for it. The pain sang like a gospel.

He was dreaming. He must have been. One of those dreams that came about rarely. One that mixed pleasure and pain so carefully together, like blood and ejaculate- pink and viscous as it dripped down the inner thigh.

If he was dreaming, then surely acting on the wills of the worm was a natural part of this act? An appropriate crescendo to the piece.

His blood was pumping in his skull, screaming through his ears. All he could see was Goodsir, his curls and soft eyes. Thick lashes hidden behind the lens of his spectacles and a mouth like a maiden’s- full and softened at the corners. Not unlike his wife’s lips. Except when Stephen looked at his wife’s lips, he felt a sense of performance, but when he looked upon the mouth of his assistant surgeon, now within this dreamlike state, he felt a draw. A gravity. As natural as the skin that was flushing with heat below his nightshirt.

He hadn’t realised he was leaning in until he was aware of Goodsir leaning away from him. There was something in his eyes, that knowingness that Stephen was familiar with, but also a slight frisson of something more. Perhaps panic. Perhaps fear. Perhaps disgust. Stephen could not read it, but he stilled his frame. He stilled his frame, but he didn’t draw away. Continuing to stare foggily into Goodsir’s eyes, unable to account for his body as it felt so severely detached from him now.

Goodsir was arched back in his seat slightly away from Stephen, he slowly removed his spectacles with one hand and folded them against his chest, placing them with the needles. Goodsir was looking into his face with an expression that held none of its characteristic softness. Maybe that was a smile twisting in the corner of his lips? If it was, it wasn’t a pleasant one, more of a teasing one. A silent _‘I knew it’_.

Stephen was beyond caring. After all, this was a dream.

Until he realised that it wasn’t.

And Stephen realised it wasn’t when he felt Goodsir leaning into him.

“Sir, you’re suffering from blood loss.” Goodsir’s voice was below a murmur. He was straightening back into a regular seating position, meaning that he was now inches from Stephen. His body was hot where it settled between Stephen’s thighs, his clothed knees pushing into the flesh there. A warm hand encased Stephen’s injured one in Goodsir’s lap, and the mixture of heat and subtle throb of pain that shot through Stephen’s arm at the touch mimicked that of an arousal. Stephen was unable to move, to draw away. His whole body had gone hot, juxtaposition by the coldness of the room, of the dead numbness in his arm.

Goodsir leaned into him still, until their breath was shared. Stephen was close enough to see each individual eyelash in the man’s lids, each follicle of hair as it sprung to form his charming whiskers. For the first time in the night, his brain ceased to think. The maggot was silent in its anticipation. He was hyper aware of the sweat on his own skin, of the blood, of the smell of himself. Of the gooseflesh that was steadily crawling up his thighs, at the back of his neck, across his arms. His dead arm. It may as well have been cut off at the root of him. He couldn’t feel a thing.

“You should take a deep breath,” Goodsir all but whispered, and Stephen was momentarily confused. That is until he felt Goodsir’s hands at his side, unbuckling the tourniquet. His face moved past Stephen's, disappearing out of his sight with a brush of dark curls against his cheek. He could have wept, could have screamed, but he did neither. He just sat and felt his skin boil.

The blood rushed back into his arm like a tidal wave of freezing water. It burned up his senses, tingling in his fingertips and causing his hand to spasm where it still sat in Goodsir’s lap. He was aware of his body flinching, curling into himself, and then straightening as if shocked with hot oil. The room went black for a second, and Stephen realised it was because he had shut his eyes.

For a moment he was unable to move his hand, and then he didn’t want to. The pain came back in full force with the heat, pulsing through him in a twisted ecstasy. Stephen found himself entranced by it; his jaw sewn shut. A sound clawed its way up his throat, stoppered by his teeth and coming out in a drawn-out growl that sat in his chest. He couldn’t tell if it was a noise of anguish or of delight. He opened his eyes. It looked as if Goodsir couldn’t tell the difference either.

There was more gentle prodding at his wound, but Stephen couldn’t bring himself to look at his hand. Goodsir’s face had come back into view, and he was looking at him as if Stephen were one of his many phenomena in one of his many buckets. He seemed cloaked in a fascination as he watched the older man’s face masterfully handle the pain, stilling his expression with a hard exhale, despite the fresh sheen of sweat that made lines through the grime on his face.

Stephen couldn’t turn his eyes away either. Those eyes so dark, those lips so full. The gentle perspiration on Goodsir’s brow. He was a fae-like creature, placed in front of him to tempt him. To call forth the maggot.

If this were one of his dreams, Stephen would have already answered the beckoning of the maggot. But this wasn’t a dream, was it? His head was so full of blood, or empty of it. He couldn’t tell. Either way his vision was backlit, as if aglow from the lanterns in the room. Goodsir was close again, he always was. He was beautiful. He was disgusting. He was gorgeous in his sin. In Stephen’s sin. He knew. He must know. Goodsir’s breath was warm on his face.

“Sir, you’re…” there was a dizzying pause, in which Goodsir carefully studied Stephen’s face. He was oh so close to him. “…not in your right mind, I believe.”

Stephen’s breathing picked up as he looked into the deep pits of Goodsir’s eyes, like two scorched marbles. He couldn’t help himself in wanting to breath the man in, relishing in his closeness. Hating it.

“Then…” it was the first time Stephen had spoken since the few grunts he had made when he first sat down. His voice was wrecked and dry, shaking in his throat. The back of his neck chilled with perspiration as he cast his eyes over Goodsir’s mouth again. “I suppose I can’t be held accountable…” Speaking was difficult, he was verbally slurring his words, “...for my actions?”

There was a small inhale of breath, and Stephen realised that Goodsir had made it. This was ludicrous. This is everything he craved and yet he wanted nothing more than to purge himself, to choke on his own pale fingers and bring forth this black worm alongside a mouthful of bile and pus. But Mr Goodsir was beautiful, and his dark eyes fluttered down incrementally before fixing on Stephen’s once more with a fire in them.

“You have blood on your mouth,” he said, barely a whisker away from Stephen now, voice so low it felt like warm fingers running down Stephen’s spine. Stephen felt his breath stutter, those cow eyes flicked down to look at his mouth and it burned him. Stephen was leaning in again, closing the gap between them, and Goodsir was letting him.

Kissing Mr Goodsir was like picking a scab. Satisfying in a deeply unsettling way. Pleasurable and yet disgusting. But, like that action, Stephen couldn’t stop. Once he felt that giddy give of skin under his fingernails, he was unable to stop shucking away. And god it disgusted him. It hurt him. But it felt so good.

Stephen had never allowed himself to imagine if kissing a man would be any different from kissing a woman, from kissing his wife- but of course it was. It was so starkly different that it made him want to weep. He felt dizzy as he pushed their lips together.

Goodsir was immediately responsive, but there was a tentativeness about him, as if he were simply entertaining Stephen. As if this were nothing but another one of their conversations in the sickbay where Goodsir would only tolerate Stephen. He hated it, but god he craved it as well.

Afterall, this is everything he needed. He didn’t want eagerness, or requited emotion. He wanted to be treated as if he were of no consequence to Goodsir. That Goodsir was simply scratching behind the ears of some monstrous cat as he passed it, only entertaining the idea of intimacy with it.

They kissed firmly, in short bursts. Every breath Stephen took smelled of blood, and of saliva, and of testosterone. He realised it was hard to decide if he could smell his own musk or Goodsir’s. It was easy when he kissed a woman to make the distinction between him and her, but with Goodsir he seemed to be melting into him, melding himself into one being through the contact of their mouths.

Goodsir’s skin was hot and Stephen could feel the man’s whiskers scratching against his face as they moved as one, dragging across the sweat that sat there. He was aware of his injured hand that still laid limp in the other man’s lap and, for whatever reason, this incidental contact drove a fever into Stephen.

Goodsir brought a hand, hot and clammy, to the back of Stephen’s neck. He was touching him. This man actually made contact with the monstrous flesh of Stephen’s. It was as if Stephen had never been touched before in his life, as if he had long since forgotten what human contact felt like. He was thoroughly undeserving of it, it made him gasp loudly. The feeling of this gentle hand holding him.

Goodsir made no movement to force him in any direction, he simply rested his hand there, as if he were tired of it, as if Stephen’s neck were simply a place to hang limbs. His own hand gripped the edge of the operating table with a fierce grip, as if nailed there.

Stephen made a throaty noise, a horribly desperate thing, as he sought to close the gap between him and Goodsir over and over again. He felt Goodsir shuffle closer to the edge of his stool, his knees climbing ever further under the blood-soaked fabric of Stephen’s night shirt. A dangerous heat threatened to curl in his loins, the gash in his hand throbbed with it too. There was a taste of copper flowing to the back of his tongue, mixed with the unmistakably human taste of Mr Goodsir, warm and unusual.

The short bursts steadily evolved to long sweeps, deepening, intensifying. The texture of Goodsir’s tongue against his own created a giddy pleasure, and Stephen felt it travel as a heat over his chest and down into his gut. The pain in his arm continued to climb, but it was muddy with pleasure, an interesting itch across Stephen's skin that drove him deeper away from himself.

The sickbay seemed to rumble around them, deathly silent and yet closing in. Closer and closer, until the walls ceased to exist, and all Stephen could feel was the hard wood of the table beneath his thighs and the push and pull of another man’s mouth against his own.

Not just another man. Mr Harry Goodsir. The tempter of the worm. The caller of the black maggot. The maggot that Stephen had repressed for years. Years of his life lost to swallowing down the bile over and over again. Swallowing and yet enduring it in the sanctity of the dream realm, of the unconscious, of the way he would observe the men around him, never able to scratch the thing from his being. Never able to erase it, it forever lingered in him like the fine salt of chalk dust on a blackboard. Like a questionable stain upon black uniform.

But now he had given in, and the maggot squirmed within him in a sick plea of victory- fed at last. One moment of weakness and his entire life’s performance had come crashing down like a safety curtain.

He wondered if Goodsir could feel his heart beating, feel it where it rattled behind his ribs like an animal in a cage. Stephen’s body, his large frame that always seemed so sturdy, shivered with a mixture of panic and pleasure.

He prided himself in his nobility, his education. His stature that is both academically and physically grand. But there was nothing noble about this. About devouring a man like this.

His desires had haunted him, and now they had killed him, and he had transgressed past life and into the monstrousness of death- able to move and do and act as he pleased. So, he deepened the kiss, he drove his tongue into this man’s mouth, and he tasted him the way one would taste an oyster. The way he had tasted his wife in the past.

He felt nothing in those moments of forced intimacy- Stanley on his knees in her dressing room. The smell of her on his face seemed to be like a plague he couldn’t wash off, there to remind him of his consistent lack of lust for it. He felt no lack of lust now. In fact, lust ran through him freely like a red river, tightening his stomach.

A wave of pain soared through Stephen as Goodsir pressed his fingers carefully into the tender flesh surrounding his closed orifice. He teased it as if it were the wet opening of a doxy, caressing the closed swollen lips of his injury, stroking over the fresh stitches with the pad of his thumb.

Stephen’s brain short-circuited. He made a strangled noise, his legs straining from the table, brushing Goodsir’s. Goodsir’s mouth was persistent on his own, barely letting him up for breath as the pain seared up his arm.

A flash of a thought crashed across Stephen’s mind then, of being penetrated like this, with Goodsir’s thumb digging through the delicate cords of veins and arteries, caressing them like one would the strings of a violin. A sodomite not just of the flesh but of the blood, of the innards. Like buggering offal.

Goodsir persisted, pressing down a little harder. He never once strayed from his oath, only making sure to press the areas where he knew there would be no strain on the stitches. His mouth was firm on Stephen’s, shock of teeth across his lip, and Stephen was gasping for air. He was gasping for air, but he was unable to get any. His head was swimming, still woozy from blood loss and now furthered into that murky pond of delirium by a mixture of the pain and the lack of oxygen.

Just as panic was clawing up Stephen’s back, just as he felt as if he should pull away, Goodsir parted the kiss. It occurred to Stephen then that he would have let himself asphyxiate if it meant that Goodsir would never stop touching him, he would go blue with his want.

The touch on his hand returned to a gentle hold. The grip on his neck sank away, leaving Stephen cold. It was as if Goodsir were punishing Stephen, as if through kissing him he had absorbed his guilt and was using it against him. The assistant nipped his lower lip in a painful fashion before pulling away. A final bite of the viper before it slunk off into the tall grass.

Stephen’s eyes opened slowly, the world still fuzzy around the edges. The soft light of the sickbay was interrupted by the obstruction of Goodsir’s frame as he leaned carefully away from Stephen, out of reach. Stephen fought for his breath, his gaze passing slowly over Goodsir’s features as they retreated, feeling as if he wanted to close the gap, but he dared not move. Dared not for the fear of really losing control then, of pursuing more than a kiss. A different sort of devouring. He had seen illustrations of gal-boys, had envisioned it in his dreams- he knew how it could be done. His heart thumped with a sickness in his chest.

There was no going back from that.

There was no going back from _this_.

Goodsir was considering Stephen’s face with a quiet resolve, the silence of the sickbay was no longer a welcome solace but a deafening tomb. His lips were kiss bitten and red, his mutton chops flattened to his face at an angle. Goodsir’s eyes were heavy lidded, but they were clear and level, sparkling. Stephen could only assume he looked the exact opposite of this picture of lust-bitten composure. If Goodsir was composed in his lust, then Stephen was a symphony of chaos, grasping at his equanimity with hands slicked in bodily excess.

He wanted more, he wanted to lean in and finish what the worm had started, but his thoughts were stopped by a soft hand on his wounded wrist, lifting the limb back into Stephen’s lap. His own lap. The rightful owner of the damage.

“You need to get cleaned up, sir.” Honorifics were bizarre after such a display. Goodsir shuffled away from him, swinging his legs and standing from the stool, looming over Stephen the best a man of his stature could. His eyes flickered down to the floor, and then Stephen felt them travelling to his blood-soaked nightshirt, and then briefly to the expanse of chest and neck that was still on display- smudged with congealed blood.

Stephen felt as if a stone had been dropped down his throat, sinking quickly into his stomach and knotting cold in his intestines.

“What?” his voice was deathly soft, barely registering above a vibration in his chest. He knew his face was painfully open, pitiful to look at, and yet he didn’t have the strength to conceal it. He was confused. Hurt and yet pleasured. A dizzying mix of thought and non-thought, of numbness, filled his skull. He swallowed into a dry throat, no longer able to gulp this down.

“You’re covered in blood, sir,” Goodsir said slowly, as if taking great care to explain. “You need to get cleaned up. Changed.” And then, as if nothing unusual had transpired between them whatsoever, he collected his tools from next to where Stephen was sat. “I can have some clean clothes brought to your cabin, unless you already are in possession of some?”

Stephen sat rooted to the spot, watching Goodsir move as if through a murky windowpane. He was aware again of the dull thud of pain that continued to streak up his arm. He felt sick. Sick in his dizziness, sick in haemorrhage, sick in his thoughts. Disordered. Wrong. He let his tongue dart out to taste his lips briefly, as if making sure that he hadn’t imagined the past events. All he tasted was blood. It flooded his nasal cavity with its vile stench.

“I trust this will all seem like a bad dream tomorrow, Sir.” Mr Goodsir was now at the far end of the room, speaking pleasantly. Stephen felt as if he were disappearing into a deep black hole.

All his life’s work, all those years of pushing, of swallowing, all undone within a few minutes. And for what? For nonchalance?

He felt suddenly then like he might swoon, tongue heavy as lead in his mouth, breathing disruptive and loud through his nose. He looked towards Goodsir, and Goodsir offered him a sideways glance as he sorted his medical box. There was a skittishness about him, as if he too felt this awful pressure that had descended onto the room. Goodsir offered him a dry smile, thin and weak.

“You probably won’t remember half of it.”

It sounded more like a suggestion than a comfort.

**Author's Note:**

> The poem at the beginning is "The Angriest Dog In The World" by David Lynch- I was going to use it as my title but then I thought the whole worm/maggot metaphor was more interesting!  
> Goodsir comes across as quite cold in this fic, but I figured that (in canon) Goodsir isn't very fond of Stanley and so this would reflect in the way that he interacts with him. Goodsir is basically stringing Stanley along simply to toy with him.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading! I really put a lot of effort into this fic so if you enjoyed even some of it then I'm pleased!  
> you can find me on:  
> tumblr [@dragonwycks](https://dragonwycks.tumblr.com/)  
> twitter [@stinkyarttt](https://www.twitter.com/stinkyarttt)  
> If you enjoyed this please consider leaving a comment!


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